I ask, and apologize for the double post, because for every individual that holds the view you seem to, there is at least one stubborn but cursed son of a bitch like me hanging around, waiting to lay down in gory detail after work why you are dead wrong to hold it.

I've been medicated since the age of about 5ish for ADHD. I've gone med-dry for rediagnosis no fewer than 3 times, because skeptical arseholes drive policies that lead people to believe "there's no way they can be handicapped with how successful they are [on meds]" without "proof". Every last time was an unceasing nightmare for the period of time I had to go without. I can barely keep a thought in my head, I can't get out a coherent sentence, my physical coordination is shot, my own sense of self gets completely obliterated, access to memory, skills and executive function is majorly impacted. I'm more a a bundle of physical reflexes and responses to stimuli than a human being at that point. That and one small section in the back of the head that can measure intent vs. Outcome, and can only marvel at the clusterf--- of higher executive going on at the time, routing the memory to the hippocampus and tagging it with every emotional emphasis available as not something to be done again.

Not being on meds at this point is not a viable option for me, and dear God, have I tried. I hate them. I hate the dependence. I hate feeling like a complete person half the time. I hate that my family and friends never get me at my best. I hate that my SO basically gets the least garbage version of me I can muster after work. Over and above the dry spells for re-diagnosis. I've done several month stints between jobs because the meds were costing too much at the time. My family and romantic life suffered, my sanity suffered, and to this day, I still deal with trying to answer what it means for me that every positive quality, nay, the mere capacity for me to perceive and think I have positive qualities is all tied up with a stupid godforsaken pill that the rest of society can at best begrudgingly tolerate letting me take, and only then with massive constraints put on my ability to roam freely without going through the nightmare of arranging medical care at my destination ahead of time because the Dimwit Enforcer Agency and the FDA have deemed it necessary.

Not once has going dry yielded a productive improvement of the condition or resulted in productive avenues of shifted thinking/practices to mitigate the downsides. There is no "learning around it" there is a functioning neural architecture that allows you to painlessly integrate and handle modern society, and there is untreated ADHD. Your (society's) expectations and mores mean nothing to the ADHD individual, because there is no one consistent supervisory thread to pick out an option. There are several hundred, and they all want direct access to the hardware now damnit.

The best way I can think of to demonstrate what the ADHD mind is like is to have someone slip on a set of earphones, pipe in a session of Congress, a cafeteria from each level of schooling, a busy doctor's office's waiting room, all at the same time, have someone talking in front of you while another person pokes, prods or massages you while wearing something you aren't used to wearing, with a box fan pointed at you full blast, in a room with a flickering strobe light that doesn't quite settle into enough of a pattern to filter. Air thick with a perfume you detest, air fillef with a scent you despise mixed with Febreeze, two to four radios in the background on stations you hate, and just loud enough to clash with what's piped in from the earphones. Now with all this going on simultaneously do long division and everything else everyone else has as an expectation for you to do as an adult (nope, children don't get a pass) in society in mind. Also, anytime someone brings up a subject of interest, pipe in about 50 somewhat related factoids in your own voice over those earphones and try to keep straight and make sense of everything.

That's ADHD. Your own personal legion of annoyance. The multiple personality people have it easy. They can blame the other. The ADHD individual is completely aware of all aspects of how badly they're failing right now, what they'd rather be doing and how awesome it would be to do something else, all the excuses they want make but know won't matter, all the possible directions for the current conversation to go, and all the vivid associations and outcomes of conversations that have happened like it in mind. They don't get much if any choice in which of these parallel thought streams takes the fore of their cognition. Even with decades of practice, it doesn't come naturally. It is thinking in manual, but that analogy breaks down because it implies that the medium being automated is not the normal state, where from every attempt to get meta-cognitive neuro-typicals to describe their thought processes to me never even come close to the level of mental noise I have to consciously cut through on a regular basis. That's all with a stimulant mind. Ground state? There are no words for it, it just is what it is; an individual equipped and processing a world in a way completely unfamiliar to what non-massively-parallel people seem to have to have any experience dealing with.

And yet, add some stimulant, and suddenly, peace, normality, and a semblance of synchronicity, order, and a kernel of normality arises out of the sea of chaos ensues. At least as long as the dose holds out. You have a stable base state for a time to learn the skills you need to employ to somewhat compensate, but once you remove that foundational state, you're right back to internal uncoordinated chaos. That meditation trick is no match for that one lady's perfume, that pomodoro is more distraction than anything else because you keep looking at the clock. You try to plan your day, but end up throwing that out the door because to hell with it. Now for something completely different.

Not on occasion, mind, but...all...the...time.

You can feel or perceive yourself as a god on meds, if you're prone to that sort of thing; someone you think is worthy of being looked up to, someone you can feel great for being, and at the end of the dose, end up feeling like a wretch, a moron, and an incompetent who can't possibly be the same person they were just a few hours earlier.

I will, and have told people with your viewpoint that they are free to hold it, but not in my presence. I am absolutely intolerant on this matter as a living bloody example of the condition with just about every diagnostic criteria checked off at its most severe, and want to make it unambiguously clear you are making the world worse for every sufferer of ADHD, myself included.

I have lived with this curse my entire life. I've grown distant from family because a family member refuses to treat his, and it compounds his other difficulties. That was his decision, he made it, and I made mine to stick with treatment, to do the best, and make the most of what gifts I have, and that the medication grants me the capability to meaningfully exercise.

I will not sit here and let anyone make light or doubt the suffering I and others experience every day without response. I won't say my bowl of shit is any worse than anyone else's, but it is damn well nevertheless there, and it damn well is something no one with a brain that just-werkz will or even likely has the capability to understand or deal with with in a way that makes it tolerable. Sad thing is, I wish you were right. I wish it was just me being lazy. I wish it was my lack of discipline. Alas, not a one perso who doubts it have I found that could even posit how to fix it, never mind learn to deal with it.

Now I won't say there isn't some level of people using an ADHD diagnosis to get access to the meds. That absolutely is a thing, and I despise it with every fibre of my being. I have been on them so long, and built up tolerance as a result, that I've exceeded most therapeutic literature, making my life a living hell of dealing with an insurance company that went out of it's way to make my treatment's as difficult to come by as possible. I've been on enough of the meds to know what works for my chemistry, and what doesn't; and I've voluntarily cut back my dosage to the relief of my therapist, but to the detriment of myself, and to the worsening of a relationship, because an old regimen was too prone to causing aggression spikes, and at this point, I'm just tired of being fully cognizant all the time of how the world is actively orchestrated to make everyone's life difficult, but not in possession of enough body or output device to do anything about it.

Call it mental suicide if you will. I broke my vow and took an extra dose, just for you. You lucky individual, because even if I hate everything about how this affliction has ruled and continues to ruin my life, I hate only one thing even more.

People who think ADHD doesn't exist. Go to hell, sir. I have seen, overcome, and been things you cannot even imagine. Just as you undoubtedly have done the same from my perspective. I have had to sacrifice and work harder than just about anyone else just to fit in well enough to be mostly ignored and left to be, and held myself to do all the more with the stupid meds for whatever degree of imagined superhumanity you reckon they must confer so that in addition to telling anyone off who doesn't figure they just level the playing field, that for any unfair tilt in my favor those pharmaceuticals may afford me, that it find a constructive outlet to the benefit of someone else.

Good day to you sir/madam/whatever floats your boat. You got a rise out of me. You win 10/10.

To all the other ADHD folks out there, I hope I've done your struggle justice, but if not, please chime in.